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DuckDuckGo Billboards

duckduckgo.com

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Re: DuckDuckGo Billboards

#51

Post by reaperducer »

yegor wrote: post #48

I really question the effectiveness of this. Here is some anecdotal evidence of billboard advertising: We took out a single test billboard downtown Toronto at a very high traffic intersection for a privacy oriented service. The billboard cost $40,000 CAD and was up for 3 months. The billboard had a domain name printed on it (along with some custom art) which only appeared on that 1 billboard. In the 3 months the doma…

If you only blame the billboard for the failure, then you don't really understand billboard advertising.

Placement, design, message, color, product, and a dozen other factors go into whether a billboard message works or not. It's why big companies hire advertising agencies to do these things for them. The agencies know the nuances of making it work, just like hiring an expert to do your AdSense buy.

I used to own a web site that advertised on billboards in the early 2000's. It worked pretty well. It helped that it was very geographic-specific, and the billboards were along major roads in those geographies.

Re: DuckDuckGo Billboards

#52

Post by reaperducer »

gtbcb wrote: post #20

I’m curious; how does this make financial sense? Maybe 3-5k billboards at maybe $500-$2k/mo, so $1.5m-$10m per month for a 100 person company?

I'm not sure how the number of employees factors into this. Is there some upper limit on the amount a company is allowed to spend on advertising per employee?

When I was a one-employee company was it wrong to spend $20,000 on billboards?

Re: DuckDuckGo Billboards

#53

Post by mjgoeke »

I gotta say, my heart sunk when I saw the headline. I totally thought ddg finally needed income and were advertising with generic non-targeted ads at the top of their page!

Re: DuckDuckGo Billboards

#54

Post by yegor »

reaperducer wrote: post #51
yegor wrote: post #48

I really question the effectiveness of this. Here is some anecdotal evidence of billboard advertising: We took out a single test billboard downtown Toronto at a very high traffic intersection for a privacy oriented service. The billboard cost $40,000 CAD and was up for 3 months. The billboard had a domain name printed on it (along with some custom art) which only appeared on that 1 billboard. In the 3 months the doma…

If you only blame the billboard for the failure, then you don't really understand billboard advertising. Placement, design, message, color, product, and a dozen other factors go into whether a billboard message works or not. It's why big companies hire advertising agencies to do these things for them. The agencies know the nuances of making it work, just like hiring an expert to do your AdSense buy. I used to own a w…

All these factors are not going to make 3+ orders of magnitude difference required to make this even remotely worthwhile. Here is the previously mentioned billboard for reference: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D0XQvm7X4AIHhnQ?format=jpg

As for your anecdotal evidence, from early 2000, this is not relevant anymore. People are looking at their smartphones while walking outside/sitting in traffic. The only reason billboard advertising still exists is because 99.9% of advertisers cannot quantify the effectiveness of their efforts.

Re: DuckDuckGo Billboards

#55

Post by mostlysimilar »

DethNinja wrote: post #24
schimmy_changa wrote: post #8

These... actually worked for me. I've been getting fed up with Google getting worse and had been intending to set my default search to DDG, and seeing the billboard was enough of a nudge to make the switch on my phone. I had tried out DDG before, but the combination of Google getting worse and DDG getting better has passed the tipping point - I wonder how many other people will do the same.

I also did the same but DDG is still worse than google for technical search. We really need more competitors at search engine space but DDG is still far away from google for technical semantics search.

That was a problem for me at first, but another small change in behavior made it slightly better. I've gotten so in the habit of using my search engine as the first step on the web that I've caught myself doing silly things like searching for "mdn " instead of just going directly to MDN and searching there. I don't know when that behavior started but it's pretty goofy. Most of the time when I'm looking up something technical, I want the official docs.

I've been trying to change my behavior to go directly to those sites instead of relying on the search engine to take me there. Same with thinking I might want an answer from Stack Overflow. Go directly to Stack Overflow and search there.

Sometimes I want to find blog posts etc., and if DDG doesn't do a good enough job I'll fall back to Google. My goal is to move Google further and further down the chain and try to use it as little as possible.

Re: DuckDuckGo Billboards

#56

Post by [deleted] »

DethNinja wrote: post #24
schimmy_changa wrote: post #8

These... actually worked for me. I've been getting fed up with Google getting worse and had been intending to set my default search to DDG, and seeing the billboard was enough of a nudge to make the switch on my phone. I had tried out DDG before, but the combination of Google getting worse and DDG getting better has passed the tipping point - I wonder how many other people will do the same.

I also did the same but DDG is still worse than google for technical search. We really need more competitors at search engine space but DDG is still far away from google for technical semantics search.

[deleted]

Re: DuckDuckGo Billboards

#57

Post by burkaman »

vortico wrote: post #40

What do the designs look like? Billboards are an interesting form of marketing. Forget everything you know about audience data collection and careful targeting of ads with Google, FB, etc. These target virtually everybody in town, it's the giant hammer solution. The highest bidder typically goes out to the company providing a product or service that averages the highest profit per person for the ads, weighted more or…

Some examples here: https://old.reddit.com/r/FoundDuckDuckGo/

Re: DuckDuckGo Billboards

#58

Post by jdofaz »

ArmandGrillet wrote: post #41

I know there are 10x more important things but "duckduckgo.com" is a really long domain name in my address bar. If I could stay on "duck.com" (that they also own), that would be great.

In my mind it is memorized as duck.com, its what I type when need to load their homepage directly and its the domain I tell people if it comes up in conversation.

Duck.com seems nicer to me but shortening askjeeves.com to ask.com didn't seem to matter, so what do I know.

Re: DuckDuckGo Billboards

#59

Post by reaperducer »

yegor wrote: post #54
reaperducer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you only blame the billboard for the failure, then you don't really understand billboard advertising. Placement, design, message, color, product, and a dozen other factors go into whether a billboard message works or not. It's why big companies hire advertising agencies to do these things for them. The agencies know the nuances of making it work, just like hiring an expert to do your AdSense buy. I used to own a w…

All these factors are not going to make 3+ orders of magnitude difference required to make this even remotely worthwhile. Here is the previously mentioned billboard for reference: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D0XQvm7X4AIHhnQ?format=jpg As for your anecdotal evidence, from early 2000, this is not relevant anymore. People are looking at their smartphones while walking outside/sitting in traffic. The only reason billboar…

Here is the previously mentioned billboard for reference:

Now that I've seen the billboard in question, I'd say I was spot on. Especially the parts about design and placement.

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